Abstract
Kronstadt is a naval fortress, built in 1703 by the tsar Peter the Great, on the Kutlin island in the Gulf of Finland, 30 kilometres in the west of Saint Petersburg (which in the early days of the 20th Century was named Petrograd, and then later renamed Leningrad, and is now Saint Petersburg again), it used to be the Russian Baltic Fleet's base. This fortress is very famous, because in March 1921, there was the first and the last popular armed uprising against the despotism of the Communist Party. The revolt ran only for 18 days but the myth of the Kronstadt uprising is still enduring, especially in the Anarchist environments. This event is one of the main references of the History of Anarchism with the Paris Commune and the legendary Anarchist soldiers of the Spanish Civil War.
In October, 1917, the Bolsheviks took the power by the way of a coup d'état in Saint Petersburg and overthrew the provisional government of Kerensky (Liberal and Socialist Revolutionary coalition). In the October Revolution the role of the fortress of Kronstadt was already very important; a great mutiny of soldiers and sailors promoted the end of the provisional government. This revolution was a kind of coup d'état made by the Bolsheviks, and also in many aspects a popular movement. But after, Russia was ruled by an authoritarian party, and the revolution lost its popular and sovietic facets. The Bolsheviks started to ruled alone, and the other revolutionary politic factions as the Anarchists, the Social-Revolutionary, the Liberals were treated as counter-revolutionaries or petit-bourgeois by the new centralised power. Soon afterwards Russia dissolved into a civil war. For several years (1918-1921), the Reds (those who support the new Bolshevik government, led by Vladimir Lenin) and the Whites (Monarchists, and all the counter-revolutionaries) armies fought in order to keep or take the power. In these years, many Anarchists assisted the Bolsheviks in their struggle with the Whites, they found the repressive policies of the government reprehensible, but a White victory seemed worse.
